The New York Review has reprinted some of Hilary Mantel’s written advice to actors who are performing the stage adaptation of her historical novels Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. To Cardinal Archbishop Thomas Wolsey, she states: “You are, arguably, Europe’s greatest statesman and greatest fraud.” Ben S. Bernanke, the former Chairman of the …

Bibi DeitzAndre Dubus's literary superpower is to hit upon that one thing about a character that makes him him, or her her. And in so doing, with subtle, clever details—breadcrumbs on the trail to the nucleus …

Luke Barr's Provence, 1970: M. F. K. Fisher, Julia Child, James Beard, and the Reinvention of American Taste (Clarkson Potter, $15) would make a great film. There is gorgeous food, impressive scenery—all those twisty little roads and green vistas!—and lots of backstabbing. …

Writing fiction about an impersonator is like playing Russian roulette with an allegory gun. Those who survive, whose books don't lapse into neat parables of the process of writing, tend to be brilliant. Examples include George Saunders (CivilWarLand in Bad Decline), Tom McCarthy (Remainder), and Pynchon (the reenactment of Alpdrucken in Gravity's Rainbow). The latest is Jacob Rubin, with his new novel The Poser, about the rise and fall of a gifted impressionist.

Elena Ferrante is often asked about the classical influences in her work, and reading her early novels you can see why. They are strikingly compressed and spare, set largely in enclosed, almost anonymous, spaces that evoke the stage of a Greek drama, their focus turned inward. The Neapolitan series takes a different tack, resembling not the claustrophobic Greek tragedy but the expansive epic.